Listen to My Voice (24 page)

I took the train to Trieste. After I got home, I opened the plastic bag the police had turned over to me. Inside I found the keys to his house and car, a regional motorway pass (which had expired a month previously), a small address book, a wallet with worn edges, and a white envelope with my name written on it.

The wallet contained a few coins, a 50,000-lire note, two 5,000-lire notes, a national health insurance card, a little card from a supermarket in Monfalcone with stamps (he had only four to go) accumulated towards the longed-for prize: a towelling bathrobe, and, sticking out from a side compartment, a little photograph, showing its age. An elegant woman, not tall, distractedly holding a child’s hand, stared at the photographer with an expression between haughty and annoyed. The picture must have been taken in Venice, in the Piazza San Marco or on the banks of the Grand Canal, facing the Giudecca. The child, a little boy, was smiling and pointing at something that had surprised him. A ship? Some seabird he’d never seen? The mother’s ego, her unique focus on herself, shone through her eyes, while the boy’s pupils gleamed with insatiable, joyous curiosity. On the back of the photo, written in ink faded by time, these words:
Venice
1936
. Mama and I on the embankment
. Massimo Ancona and his mother, the philosophy of language professor and the indefatigable canasta player, my father and my grandmother, closed up in a wallet like the great majority of common mortals.

The name of a restaurant in Monselice was imprinted on the green plastic cover of the address book, which contained only a few telephone numbers. Under D, the doctor’s and the dentist’s numbers; under T, the numbers of three or four trattorias; here and there, contact information for some publishing houses and two or three feminine names; and on the first page, my number in Trieste, and below it, written in pencil in a more tremulous hand, my number in Israel.

The same unsteady hand had scrawled my name on the front of the envelope. I opened it. Inside were two yellowing sheets of paper (with the letterhead of a hotel in Cracow), filled with writing on both sides.

Grado Pineta, 13 May

I don’t know whether this letter will ever come into your hands – if you’re reading it, that means I’m no longer a part of this world. You know how much I detest sentimentality; nevertheless, I can’t help writing you these lines. After all, you were the unhoped-for
.

The dreaded and the unhoped-for
.

You arrived at the end of my days, and, like one of those plants that thrust out their thin (and extremely forceful) roots to colonise the surrounding territory, you opened a crack in my life with your eyes, your voice, your questions, and ever since then, those eyes, that voice, those questions – I’ve been unable to free myself from them
.

Is it the call of the blood or the weakness of senility? I don’t know. I don’t have enough strength or time left to answer you. It’s not very important, all in all. At this point, I don’t have to defend myself or explain anything any more
.

Today I tried to kill myself
.

There’s nothing remarkable or melodramatic about this. The decision eventually to take my own life is one I made when I first began to use my reason. Since we haven’t chosen to be born, determining where and how we die is the only true freedom granted us. My body is in obvious decline, and unfortunately my mind is following right behind it
.

This morning, the security shutter on the window to my room broke, and I couldn’t open it. I stayed in the dark until five o’clock in the afternoon, uselessly trying to track down the repairman by telephone. His office kept saying things like, ‘Try calling back a little later, or we’ll call you,’ but nothing happened, so in the end I decided to take a walk. I stepped out
into
the soft May air, accompanied by the tireless flights of birds bringing food to their nests; I saw little yellow flowers everywhere, growing up out of cracks in the cement. The month of May, I thought, is the most extraordinary time of year to leave the earth forever, the time that requires the most nerve, because that’s when life is in the fullness of its splendour. It can’t take much courage to kill yourself in November, when the sky is covered with gloomy rain clouds. Now, you may think depression has pushed me to this point, but in fact I’m completely lucid and fully aware of my choice
.

After I got home, I tried to call you. I wanted to hear your voice one last time, but I had no luck. At the other end of the line, there was a succession of different people, speaking a little English, a little Hebrew, and a little Spanish, but none of them managed to find you
.

Then I climbed up on a chair to retrieve my revolver, which has been on top of the bookshelf, wrapped in a dark cloth, for many years. I loaded the gun and waited for the night to end, reading my favourite poems. I had no wish to die inside, like a rat; I wanted to take my leave in an open space, facing the sea, to watch the dawn one more time, to see the sun coming up and flooding the world with light
.

Around four o’clock, I went down to the beach. As I walked along in the darkness, I could hear the seashells crunching under my shoes. I sat down on the same rowboat you chose one day when we stopped to rest. I could feel the cold metal against my thighs
.

A little after five, the eastern sky over Trieste and Istria began to lighten. The air was filled with the cries of seabirds, and the sea, still at low tide, lapped gently at the shore. I looked around and slipped the revolver out of my pocket, waiting. When the top of the orange disc showed over the horizon, I pointed the gun at my temple and pulled the trigger. There was a loud click, and nothing happened. I rotated the cylinder and tried again: another click
.

In the meantime, a pensioner and his two poodles had appeared on the beach. He threw a coloured ball into the air, and the dogs chased after it, barking happily. I can’t even kill myself, I thought, putting the revolver back in my pocket
.

A few hours later, the shutter repairman arrived and brought light into my room. That afternoon, I went to Monfalcone to do a bit of shopping. Life goes on, I don’t know for how much longer, but it goes on, I thought as I dropped the revolver into a drawer. I’ll wait until fate runs its course
.

In the evening, I stood on the little kitchen balcony. The temperature was almost summery, warm enough to ferment the algae in the lagoon and saturate the air with briny vapours. The lights were on in a flat in the building across from mine; a woman with an apron and a bucket was giving the place a thorough clean, getting ready for the imminent tourist season
.

I was going back inside when a sudden brightness caught my eye among the unkempt shrubs that divide the two buildings. Fireflies. It had been years since I’d seen fireflies. They were dancing between the ground and the bushes, stitching the air with their intermittent glow. Just the previous day, I would have smiled at the cunning of nature’s reproductive strategies; what else could that light be but an extraordinary stratagem for engaging in copulation?

But that evening, all at once, everything seemed different. I no longer felt irritated at the housewife who was cleaning her floors; I no longer saw the fireflies’ little
ignis fatuus
as part of a mechanical process
.

There’s no cunning in that light, but rather wisdom, I said to myself, and I began to cry. Nearly sixty years had passed since the last time I’d done that, on the ship that was taking us to Brazil
.

I wept slowly, in silence, without sobs; I wept for those little sparks, enveloped in the tyranny of night, and for their unsteady motion, because suddenly it was clear to me that in every darkness there lives, compressed, a fragment of light
.

Am I making you laugh? Do I seem pathetic? Maybe so. These words will probably aggravate the unextinguished rage of your youth, but I’ve reached the point where nothing matters any more. And so I’ll cover myself with even more ridicule by telling you that throughout these past months, I’ve lived with the hope of seeing you again
.

You know I’ve always followed a policy of honesty (even though it has sometimes done me harm). In these present days, in the remaining time that fate has granted me, I’ve freed myself from my pride, and I have the possibility of reflecting on things without fear, because basically, I’m already dead; I can feel the sheet on my body and the moist earth covering me. Precisely because I’m in the beyond (and no longer afraid of ridicule), I can tell you that it was fear that determined my days; what I called boldness was actually nothing but panic. I was afraid that things wouldn’t go the way I’d decided they should. I was afraid of passing some limit – not a mental limit, but a limit of the heart. I was afraid of loving and of not being loved in return
.

In the end, that’s man’s only real terror, and it’s the reason why he gives himself over to pettiness
.

Love, like a bridge suspended over the void . . 
.

Out of fear, we complicate simple things. In order to follow the phantoms of our minds, we transform a straight path into a labyrinth we don’t know how to escape
.

It’s so difficult to accept the rigours of simplicity, the humility of trusting
.

What else have I done my whole life long besides this: run away from myself, run away from responsibilities, wound others before they could wound me?

When you read these lines (and I’m in a refrigerated room or the cold ground), know that in my last days I was inhabited by a feeling of sadness – a melancholy sadness, without anger, and perhaps for that reason even more painful
.

Pride, humility; in the end, those are the only two things being weighed in the balance. I don’t know what their specific weights are, so I can’t say whether or not a day of humility can suffice to redeem a life of pride
.

It would have been wonderful to be able to give you a hug, little time bomb, who turned up by surprise (and too late) to ravage my life. Even if this doesn’t make up for anything, I wanted to hold
you
one last time, long and hard, and inside that embrace there would have been all the hugs I never gave you, the ones from when you were born and when you were little and when you were growing up, and the ones you’ll need when I’m not around any more
.

Forgive the obtuseness of the sneering man who brought you into the world
.

Papa

The funeral took place a week later, in the Jewish cemetery in Trieste. Aside from the members of the minyan and the rabbi, I was the only one there. The recital of the Kaddish was barely over when the noon siren went off, very loudly, in the nearby shipyards.

There weren’t many people in the graveyard on that hot summer day. Instead of going home, I walked up to the Catholic cemetery. I stopped at the stalls by the entrance before I went in and bought a bunch of pretty sunflowers.

During the winter, the bora had carried many leaves, together with various advertising flyers, into our little family mortuary chapel, now long neglected. The air inside was suffocating, and there was an odour of damp and mildew; it had been years since anyone had done any cleaning in there. I opened the door wide and set off to buy a broom and a cloth. When the job was done,
I
put the flowers in the vase and sat down to keep you company for a while.

Who can tell where you were and how you were? Maybe, at least on the other side, you and my mother had met; maybe you two had finally managed to dispel the shadows that kept you from having a serene relationship. Maybe you and she could see me from up there, sitting on your tomb on a summer afternoon. Maybe it’s true that the dead have the power to stand beside the living and protect them without ever letting them out of their sight. Or is that just a wish of ours, one of our all-too-human hopes? Is it true that on the other side there really is a judgement, with the light-fingered archangel Michael holding up the delicate scales? And how are the units of measurement established? Is the specific weight the same for every act? Are there only two categories – good and evil – or are the listings a bit more complex? How much do the sufferings of an innocent weigh? Is the violent death of a just man worth the same as the passing of an evil man who dies full of days? Why do the wicked often enjoy long, untroubled lives – as if someone were protecting them – while the gentle must endure insults and adversity? The longevity granted to unscrupulous men – could that be a sign of divine mercy, which allows them to live so long in order to have more time to repent and convert their hearts?

And sorrow, what’s the weight of sorrow?

My mother’s sorrow, my father’s, yours, Uncle Ottavio’s, and mine (when I die) – what happens to all that sorrow? Does it turn to inert dust, or nourishment? Wouldn’t it be better if one could lead a carefree life, no questions asked? What becomes of the man who never interrogates himself, who has no doubts?

Arik spoke to me about the inclination to good and evil that’s in every one of us, of the struggle that’s constantly taking place in our heart. To live a life of inertia, no questions asked – isn’t that tantamount to giving yourself over to the banal mechanics of existence, to the inexorable law of gravity, always and forever dragging us down? Don’t doubts and questions arise from nostalgia? As the apical cells always and forever drive plants upward, searching for light, so must questions drive us humans towards heaven. Sorrow, confusion, the devastation of evil – couldn’t they be, perhaps, the consequences of our veering off course?

One of the people I met in Israel was Miriam, a French survivor of Auschwitz, who oversaw the kibbutz’s little library. On one arm, she wore several jangling bracelets, and on the other, the violet tattoo of her number. I couldn’t take my eyes off it.

‘Does it upset you?’ she asked me.